


The Teeth of the Smiling God

by punkrockgaia



Series: The Great and Terrible Workings of The Smiling God [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Blood, Brief mention of drugs, Eye Horror, M/M, Religion, Violence, Viscera, brief mention of icky sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 21:34:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockgaia/pseuds/punkrockgaia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some men are born to be poets. Some, great lovers. Some, brilliant scientists or architects or composers that make the world weep with their music.</p><p>Diego was born to be razor-steel, the smooth motion of a well-oiled trigger, the searing chill of tightly-contained rage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Teeth of the Smiling God

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to necessarily follow up on the story "We Are Light," but a discussion on VidenteFernandez' tumblr (videntefernandez.tumblr.com) made me think about my headcanon for Diego, and hence this story. 
> 
> As always, Diego belongs to VidenteFernandez, and to history.

Some men are born to be poets. Some, great lovers. Some, brilliant scientists or architects or composers that make the world weep with their music.

Diego was born to be razor-steel, the smooth motion of a well-oiled trigger, the searing chill of tightly-contained rage.

The teeth of the Smiling God.

And then he’d met someone. A beautiful someone with a voice like a sunbeam and eyes like pits of darkness, someone who shared his enthusiasm for viscera, whose faith and zeal matched his own. A someone who became devoted to him, just as he’d become devoted. And he’d become all he’d previously been, but with a shining core of light and blood-soaked candy fluff.

And the Smiling God had smiled. 

In the beginning, he’d honestly had no opinion of Palmer. Yes, he was his brilliant darling’s double, but he seemed not so much a double as a poor facsimile, an image photocopied on a machine that was nearly out of toner. Oh, he’d break Palmer one day, he had no doubt about that, and no illusions about his role in the Great Workings of his Empyrean Father. But it was duty, and only just that.

And then his Kevin was gone. 

And the bright titanium chains that bound his rage began to slip.

And the Smiling God smiled wider, and touched his heart, and filled it with Glorious Purpose.

His Kevin was gone, and Palmer was allowed to walk this cursed Earth. Palmer, whom Kevin had loved like a garrote loves a windpipe. Palmer, who had not deserved this love.

And suddenly, duty became obsession. 

He glowered darkly in his bunker, reliving the events of that afternoon. Palmer was crumbling, he could smell and taste it, strong as a gush of blood in a gallon of ocean water. Each encounter showed the man becoming more and more disheveled, becoming unstuck at his poorly-fitted seams. Yet his Lord and Father continued to deny Diego the release he so desperately craved. 

Not the sex. The sex was, eh. The sex was simply a manner of speaking to a prey animal in his own language, a vocabulary of grunts and fluids, as tangential as the injections that merely served as a solvent to the weakened glue that held Palmer together.

No, what Diego craved was the bright tang of blood. The abrupt spurt of ocular fluid and vitreous humor. The discordant percussion of snapping bones. The mellifluous fluting of a punctured lung. The tender moment when the jaw goes slack and the skin begins to mottle.

It won’t bring Kevin back, but you take what you can get in this life.

He’d been so sure, _so sure_ that this day would see the culmination of his work. Palmer had been _right there_ , teetering on the brink, a shaking, fading, desperate mess. And Diego had been more than ready to claim his reward. But the Smiling God, in all of his Great and Terrible Wisdom, had forced him to stop.

And he’d snapped, and beaten the living daylights out of the man. Not that he thought the Smiling God would mind; it obviously wasn’t Palmer’s body that interested Him. (He’d make sure Palmer did things like eat and sleep and bathe if it was.) Horribly, the brute had _enjoyed_ it.

(And yes, he too had succumbed to a sudden, chaotic lust, but such was the way with these things, sometimes.)

The entire thing had been sordid and shoddy. He half-hoped that Palmer would be run over by a meth-crazed truck driver on his way back to that pox-blasted little town of his. On the other hand, if that happened, he’d never get to taste Palmer’s sweet organs. Oh, Kevin would so love to join him for that feast. If only…

He shouted in frustration and blindly picked an object up from the nearby broadcasting desk, hurling it against the concrete wall, then realized what he’d done and jumped to his feet. He dashed across the room, golden heels beating out a staccato rhythm as he did. He snatched up the object and fell to his knees, cradling it like the last egg of a beautiful, endangered songbird, like the most precious thing imaginable.

And it _was_ the most precious thing imaginable, the only superfluous item he’d brought on his assignment. A gift from his beautiful, incandescent Kevin, it was a clear lucite paperweight that housed a single, pitch black eye, a thick optic nerve running tattered out of the back, with an inscription in Comic Sans reading “I only have eyes for you!  <3” just beneath.

He turned the paperweight over in his hands. It was chipped on one edge, but otherwise intact. Tears of relief ran down Diego’s flushed face as he pressed fervent kisses across its surface.

“All for you, my Darling, all for you,” he whispered, even as he knew he Blasphemed, his words echoing back to him in his dank underground lair.

And the Smiling God smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story, come howl at the void with me at punkrockgaia.tumblr.com


End file.
